In the mortgage origination industry if you want to create a sustainable model, one that will provide a steady stream of income regardless of the circumstances, you must approach the business as a business. Gone are the days where you took orders from someone else – now you’re the one calling the shots. It’s the kind of power and freedom you’ve been dreaming about. But with great power and freedom comes great responsibility. To function effectively as a business you must devise a comprehensive business plan. You’ll need to have a vision, and a purpose. You’ll need to set goals and identify who your ideal clients are going to be. And you’ll need to know exactly what marketing and operational processes you’ll need to have in place.

Non-negotiable Activity Plan

Developing your business plan is a big step. But it actually means nothing if you don’t also develop a non-negotiable activity plan as well. These are all the activities you absolutely must do, whether you feel like it or not, in order to build a sustainable business.

The items that go on your non-negotiable activity plan are the tasks you need to do in order to execute your strategy – whether that’s in marketing or database management. This is where you add all the tasks, no matter how small, in an executable and measurable format. No matter what, you’re going to execute this winning formula every single week of the year that you work. You create a foundation that regardless of how busy you get, no matter how frustrated, you know that these activities are your blueprints for success and sustainability. You can have a weekly plan or break it out by the day.

The most important thing to recognize is that these activities need to be done regardless of how many loans you take or loan level problems you face. If you have never read the Compound Effect by Darrin Hardy you should. He has taught me it is the things you do every day that add up to long-term success. Here’s an example of a non-negotiable plan.

Monday:

Email/text/call to agents – buyer updates / loan comparisons from weekend and see if they have open house prospects

5 calls to Prospect or Database

Facebook / LinkedIn Post about weekend open houses or market updates

5 REALTOR® Calls

Tuesday:

5 calls to database

Process Prospects for the following week: Mail thank you notes, schedule follow-up, add to social media and your CRM.

Regardless of the metrics and activities you put into your plan, it won’t do you any good unless you know the results. Once a week it’s important to look at how you performed in each of the activities you set and critical that you evaluate the results from those activities. Give yourself a report card. It’s really the only way to see if your plan is working. If it isn’t you’ll be able to make adjustments each week to do more of the things that create the results you want. You won’t be left at the end of the year wondering why you didn’t meet your goals.

To get a sample copy of the Activity Plan Report Card that I use click on this link:

In my recent blog about sustainability I talked about discipline being one of the cornerstones to consistently building and maintaining your business. Discipline is hard work. It takes having a plan and working it even when you don’t want to. It takes self-control and the ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel even when you’re surrounded by darkness. But what if you can’t? What if the sheer quantity of what you need to do overwhelms you?

LAZINESS: A FORM OF SELF-SABOTAGE

That’s when laziness rears its ugly head. Laziness is often defined at the quality of being unwilling to work or use energy. But that’s not how it applies as a sabotage mechanism in the mortgage industry. Laziness in this context actually results because people have too much to do. They know what they should be doing but aren’t doing it. They feel like they can’t get anywhere. They don’t know where to start so they don’t. And the longer they wait to start, the harder it is.

They sabotage their business by distracting themselves with Facebook, LinkedIn, other social media, television, or unimportant tasks. They begin to make excuses. They have an “I’ll start again, tomorrow” attitude only tomorrow never comes. Oh sure, they’ll take care of the things that absolutely have to happen – the loan closings, the doc preparation, taking applications from referrals that drop in their lap. But doing the tasks that need to be done, the ones with long-term rewards, the ones that will sustain their business, get shut out by their distraction of choice.

COMBATING LAZINESS

If you feel like laziness may be one of your preferred methods of sabotage I would encourage you to ask yourself these questions: what are you trying to avoid, and what do you think you’re going to gain by avoiding it and distracting yourself? Then step back and look at all the time you spent watching television, surfing the web, texting, etc. and make a list of all the things you’ve created from those activities. My guess is you won’t be able to put anything on that list. There is no sustainable joy or progress that comes from those activities and there certainly isn’t any sustainable business or financial success that comes from them.

I’m not saying that you have to be working on your business 24/7. We all need to time to relax and regenerate. But I am suggesting that you need to build those activities into your plan after you have done your daily disciplines. The goal is to remove conflict and not beat yourself up for relaxing. Yes, you’ll say, but the reason I’m not currently doing my daily disciplines is because I’m overwhelmed by them.

Often the feeling of being overwhelmed stems from a plan that is too broad in scope. Perhaps your plan says that you’re going to contact 15 people in your database every week. That can seem like a lot if you’ve got closings and applications to process. But what if instead your plan said I’ll contact 3 people each day from my database. Three doesn’t sound like much. Three is maybe a twenty minute activity. Three is doable. So stop looking at the enormity of what needs to be done and instead break each goal or project down into small pieces. Start tackling each of those small pieces and make sure to celebrate your success when you’ve accomplished them. Before you know it, the big project will be complete too and laziness will no longer be an issue.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as: the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level; continuing for an extended period or without interruption.

When I talk about sustainability in the mortgage business, I’m talking about having a consistent, reliant stream of new loans and subsequent income regardless of what is happening around you. There are several factors that affect your ability to attain sustainability. The most important of which is you. We’ll delve into that in later posts. For now, let’s start with some of the outside factors.

MARKET CHANGES

If you’ve been in the mortgage business for any amount of time you know the one thing we can always count on is that the market will change. Interest rate shifts often have the most dramatic effect but other things such as inventory, the overall economy, and consumer confidence drive market change as well. So how can you possibly create a sustainable business model with all of these variables at play? Simple – stay focused on the right thing.

The right thing in almost every circumstance is to focus on the purchase market since it is less likely to be affected by interest rate swings. Refinances on the other hand have high volatility. When interest rates go down, generally refinances go up. When interest rates go up, refinances drop. Focus includes being creative and innovative in how you reach and communicate with today’s purchasers and agents. Gone are the days when using a telephone and face-to-face meetings were the only ways to acquire business. Now you need to be as educated and online savvy as your younger potential clients in addition to still providing a “high touch” approach for the older generations.

RUN YOUR BUSINESS LIKE A BUSINESS

You’ve likely entered the mortgage business because you see the opportunity to earn “uncapped” income. I’m guessing you also like the freedom that mortgage origination allows – the idea of being your own boss. What many originators fail to grasp however, is that when they become a lender, they also become a business owner.

If you want to create sustainability, then you must think and act like a business owner. You need a business model that defines goals and activities. You need to have the metrics in place to measure the efficiency of what you are doing. You need to understand the return on investment of your time and resources. And if you don’t know how to put these things in place, you need to hire a coach that can help you get there.

CREATE A PREDICTABLE REFERRAL MODEL

Referrals are the lifeblood of this business. You must be actively focused on earning partner referrals from the very beginning. Working by referral does not mean you accept referrals when someone sends them to you. It means developing referral partners and referral pipelines that will consistently send business your way. You’ll need to build a plan to get these referrals and work that plan consistently day in and day out in order to create sustainability.

TAKE MOTIVATION OUT OF THE EQUATION

Motivation is doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done when we want to do it. Motivation is a “nice to have.” But it doesn’t get us where we need to be in terms of building a sustainable business. The majority of people don’t wake up in the morning excited to do the nuts and bolts work that needs to be done to build their business. Those are boring tasks – cold calling agents, booking appointments, entering information into the database, etc.

Building sustainability is about repetitiveness. It’s about doing the same things every day that you know will make you successful, even when those things are mundane. It takes discipline.

Discipline is doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done when we don’t want to do it.

Plan your work and work your plan – every day whether you feel like it or not. That’s what top performers in this industry do. That’s how they ride out the highs and the lows. That’s how they build a sustainable business. And that’s how you can too.